The possible privatization of Social Security has long been a matter of theoretical interest to those who ideologically favor free markets and maximum personal autonomy. But in the spirit of an age when the Berlin Wall fell and the totalitarian Soviet empire collapsed through a peaceful revolution from within, the politics of Social Security has been remade in recent years in a similarly dramatic fashion.

Ferrara, Jacobson, and their colleagues illuminate how community schools become a comprehensive, place-based strategy that both supports high-quality teaching and learning and addresses out-of-school barriers to success.

Within the author’s long-term project of updating John Rawls’s paradigm of “political liberalism” to a historical context different from the original one, this paper focuses on how political liberalism can help us understand populism and help liberal democracy survive the populist upsurge. In the first section, political liberalism is argued to be of help in directing our attention to three constitutive aspects of all sorts of populism: the conflation of “the people” with the electorate and the electorate with the nation, (...) the attribution of constituent power to the electorate, and a penchant for so-called “justified intolerance.” In the second section, enfeebled democracies and postliberal democracies are discussed as two distinctly dangerous outcomes of populist contagion. Finally, in the third section the containment of populism is argued to require targeting the socioeconomic factors undergirding the populist upsurge and the jettisoni... (shrink)

[The judgment view of higher lawmaking; ].

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 3, Page 313-332, March 2022. This article discusses Jürgen Habermas’s latest book Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie from the specific angle of what the section on Rawls indicates about the overall philosophical project pursued by Habermas. This tiny element within the imposing architecture reveals a structural problem that affects Habermas’s program for a detranscendentalization of reason. After a general premise, Habermas’s appraisal of Rawls’s work is reconstructed and critically examined. Then, in the guise (...) of a Rawlsian rejoinder, a problematic understanding of pluralism is shown to undergird Habermas’s overlooking of the ground-breaking potential of the normativity of ‘the reasonable’ and ‘the most reasonable’. Finally, this neglect is argued to be indicative of a deeper lacuna: namely, a missing confrontation with Wittgenstein’s rival path to a postmetaphysical, intersubjective, detranscentendalized reason. That lacuna, finally, invites a closer scrutiny of the overall genealogical picture and its central opposition between two pathways to the postmetaphysicization of reason. (shrink)

[Two notions of humanity and the judgment argument for human rights].

[Reflecting authenticity, the space of Europe, deliberative democracy and cosmopolitanism].

In _Rousseau and Critical Theory_, Alessandro Ferrara argues that an implicit normative understanding of the authenticity of an identity brings unity to Rousseau's multifarious lifework and contains important teachings for contemporary Critical Theory, views of self-constitution and political philosophy.

This essay is about the difficulties connected with grounding human rights philosophically in a multicultural context. These difficulties are argued to derive from the tension between our aspiration to universal validity and our shared belief in the constitutive role of life-forms, traditions, cultures, and vocabularies vis-à-vis our conceptions of justice. Rawls's and Habermas's approaches to the justification of human rights are then briefly reconstructed and assessed. A symmetrical distribution of strong and weak points is argued to obtain. In the light (...) of this reconstruction, the author explores the potential of his judgment view of justice for providing a justification of the universality of human rights not vulnerable to the difficulties of the other examined approaches. (shrink)

Frank Michelman’s recent book Constitutional Essentials. On the Constitutional Theory of Political Liberalism is discussed from a specific angle, related to how Rawls’s ‘deflection procedure’ – called by Michelman ‘justification by constitution’ – is affected by two recent innovations in the paradigm of political liberalism: first, the extension of reasonable pluralism to a family of liberal political conceptions of justice that coexist in a liberal-democratic society; second, the idea of legitimation based on the criterion of reciprocity, aimed at supplementing the (...) liberal principle of legitimacy. In the attempt to probe Michelman’s assessment of the impact of these two innovations, three critical points are mentioned, for each of them, that suggest a somewhat more sceptical attitude than Michelman’s about the capacity of ‘justification by constitution’ to remain substantially unaltered, once these innovations are in place. (shrink)

The paper discusses some thematic issues that emerge from the Kantian study of diseases of cognition and volition, taking into consideration his anthropological works and some problems emerging from his main critical works. Starting from the explanation of the taxonomy of the main mental illnesses, some epistemological themes will be illustrated, linked to the fallible relationship between transcendental truths and the empirical dimension of knowledge and to the Kantian concept of error. Subsequently, the study of affects and passions, conceived as (...) illnesses of volition, will show the difficulties linked to a total involvement of reason in moral action, concerning the shortcomings of human action with respect to the principle of responsibility. Finally, the paper will focus on the role of legal imputability in relation to moral responsibility and to mental diseases. (shrink)

During the twentieth century, the view that assertions and norms are valid insofar as they respond to principles independent of all local and temporal contexts came under attack from two perspectives: the partiality of translation and the intersubjective constitution of the self, understood as responsive to recognition. Defenses of universalism have by and large taken the form of a thinning out of substantive universalism into various forms of proceduralism. Alessandro Ferrara instead launches an entirely different strategy for transcending the (...) particularity of context without contradicting our pluralistic intuitions: a strategy centered on the exemplary universalism of judgment. Whereas exemplarity has long been thought to belong to the domain of aesthetics, this book explores the _other_ uses to which it can be put in our philosophical predicament, especially in the field of politics. After defining exemplarity and describing how something unique can possess universal significance, Ferrara addresses the force exerted by exemplarity, the nature of the judgment that discloses exemplarity, and the way in which the force of the example can bridge the difference between various contexts. Drawing not only on Kant's _Critique of the Power of Judgment_ but also on the work of Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Jürgen Habermas, Ferrara outlines a view of exemplary validity that is applicable to today's central philosophical issues, including public reason, human rights, radical evil, sovereignty, republicanism and liberalism, and religion in the public sphere. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to Lois McNay’s article “The politics of exemplarity: Ferrara on the disclosure of new political worlds.” After contextualizing her appraisal of my views on exemplarity within the current debate about critical theory and postcolonialism, and after clarifying my interpretation of Kant’s notion of sensus communis, I defend the function that this concept plays within an immanent and experience-near approach to critical theory. Sensus communis is what makes of a subjective grievance a cogent critique. I (...) then elucidate how the transcontextual communicability of human flourishing can be understood, along lines still compatible with Kant’s theory of judgment. In the final section of the paper, McNay’s suggestion to reconceptualize critique in experience-near terms is integrated as a genealogical reconstruction of sensus communis as nourished by encounters with experiences of injustice. (shrink)

In this article, Honneth’s Freedom’s Right is discussed with the intent to assess its potential for offering a view of justice, grounded in social freedom, more adequate than the theories of justic...

Alessandro Ferrara explains what he terms "the democratic horizon" - the idea that democracy is no longer simply one form of government among others, but is instead almost universally regarded as the only legitimate form of government, the horizon to which most of us look. Professor Ferrara reviews the challenges under which democracies must operate, focusing on hyperpluralism, and impresses a new twist onto the framework of political liberalism. He shows that distinguishing real democracies from imitations can be (...) difficult, responding to this predicament by enriching readers' understanding of the spirit of democracy; clearing readers' views of pluralism from residues of ethnocentrism; and conceiving multiple versions of democratic culture, rooted in the diversity of civilizational contexts. (shrink)

The paper comprehensively responds to critical comments by F. Michelman, D. Rasmussen, J. van der Walt, S. Winter, P. Niesen, and B. Schupmann on Sovereignty Across Generations. Constituent Power and Political Liberalism. The themes debated include: whether Rawls’s dualist view of democracy, including his idea of legitimation by constitution, intimates or calls for a concretistic view of a subject of constituent power as creator of the constitutional order (Michelman); the relation of the normative to the historical in political liberalism and (...) whether Plato’s allegory of the cave is helpful for elucidating the meaning of the ‘most reasonable for us’ (Rasmussen); Rawls’s stance vis-à-vis the unbridgeable divisiveness of pluralism, the virtuality of overlapping consensus, and the dissolution of constituent power into a panoply of constituent powers (Van der Walt); democratic sequential sovereignty contrasted with serial sovereignty, the sensibleness of distinguishing legal principles from the cognitive assumptions undergirding their application, the justification of sequential sovereignty, and the nexus of vertical reciprocity and freedom across generations (Winter); the implications of the gap between ‘the people’ and the population for constitutional legitimacy, and the distinct prospects for a Habermasian and a political liberal conception of constituent power to be applicable at a supranational level (Niesen); the cogency and effectiveness of ‘implicit unamendability’ for safeguarding constitutional essentials compared with entrenching them via eternity clauses, the extent to which measures of militant democracy are compatible with political liberalism (Schupmann). (shrink)

O objetivo deste estudo é apresentar as literaturas de si enquanto formas de apreensão dos procedimentos que regulam o desenvolvimento do sujeito. Parte-se do pressuposto de que a própria narrativa de si emerge de um poder linguístico anterior que a condiciona, mas que simultaneamente a faz recriar-se. A ideia principal a ser exposta é a de que ao me narrar, me construo, ainda que dentro de normas sociais pré-estabelecidas. É justamente ao me narrar que me crio e me constituo enquanto (...) sujeito. Nesse sentido, as literaturas de si podem ser consideradas suportes de análise para as teorias de sujeição.Palavras-chave: Literaturas de si. Construção do sujeito. Teorias de sujeição. (shrink)

Il presente articolo intende riflettere su come l’analogia sia intesa e trattata dalla classe di metodi formali di trattamento dell’informazione che si occupano di analizzare il testo scritto. In particolare, si considera come si possano costruire macchine che “comprendono” le analogie. A tal fine ci si avvarrà di esemplificazioni tratte dal _De Civitate Dei_ di Agostino d’Ippona. Le prime indagini compiute su tale corpus, seppure limitato, conducono a riflettere sulla portata teorica e storiografica del trattamento automatico dell’analogia anche nel formulare (...) o avvalorare ipotesi interpretative. _This article aims to reflect on how analogy is understood and treated by the class of formal information processing methods that deal with analysing written text. In particular, we consider how machines that ‘understand’ analogies can be constructed. For this purpose, exemplifications from Augustine of Hippo’s _De Civitate Dei _will be used. The initial investigations carried out on this corpus, albeit limited, lead one to reflect on the theoretical and historiographical significance of the automatic treatment of analogy also in formulating or supporting interpretative hypotheses._. (shrink)

O objetivo deste trabalho é estudar a relação que se estabelece entre as características da fenomenologia filosófica, a natureza do conhecimento que dela deriva e o modo como interfere sobre a produção do conhecimento em comunicação. Em primeiro lugar, observa-se a concepção de comunicação como processo transmissivo desenvolvida pelos clássicos estudos de mídia ou pelos processos de comunicação de massa. Em seguida, aproximam-se comunicação e semiótica como campos epistemológicos que, embora desenvolvam mútuas influências científicas, são, não raro, considerados áreas científicas (...) distintas atualmente, observa-se a emergência de outras bases de reflexão que podem aproximar a comunicação e a semiótica, enquanto áreas científicas. (shrink)

Two rival conceptions of well-being are reconstructed and contrasted, which have contended for philosophical pre-eminence throughout the Western conversation of philosophy. One view understands well-being as a life course in which as many as possible of a subject’s preferences are satisfied. The other view understands well-being as a life course in which some unique project of the subject comes to be realized. In the second part of the paper the aggregative view of well-being, championed by Hobbes and Locke is shown (...) to correlate with a radically or moderately understanding of freedom, and the holistic view of well-being with a positive notion of freedom, championed by Rousseau, Kierkegaard and Kohut. After showing how some of the conceptual difficulties of the radically negative view of freedom reverberate on the aggregative notion of well-being, in the final section some constitutive dimensions of the holistic view are discussed. (shrink)

Cristina Lafont’s Democracy Without Shortcuts enriches the discussion of deliberative democracy with new insights. After discussing her three objections against Waldron’s denunciation of judicial review as antidemocratic, the main flaw of Waldron’s thesis is argued to remain out of focus. The constitution is understood by him as owned by the living citizens, in a pattern of serial sovereignty that raises three problems: (a) the ‘wanton republic’; (b) the under-individuation of the polity; (c) generational inequality. The answer to Lafont’s question ‘Can (...) We Own the Constitution?’ (Section Three) is then argued to be that only ‘we the people’, including past, present and future ‘free and equal’ generations, own the constitution. The living citizens are the segment of ‘the people’ endowed with agency, have a voice, can modify the inherited political scheme, but cannot legitimately disfigure it, under penalty of destroying the regulatory function of the constitution. (shrink)

Drug resistant epilepsy is one of the most complex, multifactorial and polygenic neurological syndrome. Besides its dynamicity and variability, it still provides us with a model to study brain-behavior relationship, giving cues on the anatomy and functional representation of brain function. Given that onset zone of focal epileptic seizures often affects different anatomical areas, cortical but limited to one hemisphere, this condition also let us study the functional differences of the left and right cerebral hemispheres. One lateralized function in the (...) human brain is emotional prosody, and it can be a useful ictal sign offering hints on the location of the epileptogenic zone. Besides its importance for effective communication, prosody is not considered an eloquent domain, making resective surgery on its neural correlates feasible. We performed an Electronic databases search (Medline and PsychINFO) from inception to July 2017 for studies about prosody in epilepsy. The search terms included “epilepsy,” “seizure,” “emotional prosody,” and “vocal affect.” This review focus on emotional prosody processing in epilepsy as it can give hints regarding plastic functional changes following seizures (preoperatively), resection (post operatively), and also as an ictal sign enabling the assessment of dynamic brain networks. Moreover, it is argued that such reorganization can help to preserve the expression and reception of emotional prosody as a central skill to develop appropriate social interactions. (shrink)

The idea of a ‘true’ account of pluralism is ultimately contradictory. Liberal political philosophers often fell prey to a special version of this fallacy by presupposing that there might be only one correct argument for justifying the acceptance of pluralism as the core of a liberal democratic polity. Avoiding this trap, Rawls’s ‘political liberalism’ has offered a more sophisticated view of reasonable pluralism as linked with the ‘burdens of judgement’. His philosophical agenda, however, left some questions underexplored: What is the (...) relation of pluralism to relativism? How can a conception of pluralism avoid being either one view among others with no special claim to truth, or a foundationalist claim? If pluralism is a fact, in what sense can it bind us? These questions – crucial for grasping the distinctiveness of ‘political’ liberalism – are addressed by revisiting Plato’s simile of the cave, in order to make it accommodate the groundbreaking Rawlsian notion of the ‘r... (shrink)

In this paper the notion of sensus communis, as articulated by Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, is discussed from the vantage point of the author's project of exporting the model of exemplary universalism underlying reflective and, specifically, aesthetic judgment beyond the realm of aesthetics. In the first section, the relevance of such a project relative to an appraisal of the new and unsuperseded philosophical context opened by the Linguistic Turn is elucidated. Then the centrality of sensus (...) communis, for making sense of the specific universalism inherent in reflective judgment, is highlighted. In the second section, the limitations inherent in two opposite strategies for conceptualizing sensus communis are discussed: namely, the hermeneutic idea of a `horizon' and the phenomenological notion of a life-world on one hand, and the Kantian minimalist, naturalized concept of sensus communis on the other. The former is argued to become entangled in relativism, the latter to run against our intuitions concerning the inter-subjective constitution of the subject. In the final section, a third notion of sensus communis is offered, still compatible with the Kantian conception, different from the Gadamerian concept of a tradition or to the phenomenological notion of Lebenswelt, yet still capable of offering a plausible ground for the exemplary universalism of aesthetic judgment. Expanding on Kant's view of aesthetic pleasure, sensus communis is understood as consisting of a universal capacity, on the part of every human being, to sense from within a plurality of coordinates the flourishing of human life and what favours it. (shrink)

The article, through the case study of Chile, explores the interconnections between archives, human rights and transitional justice. Chile represents a unique case globally for the early creation of thousands of records documenting the human rights violations committed under Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship. In post-Pinochet Chile, the human rights archives have provided extremely important sources of evidence that have proven crucial in the development of transitional justice mechanisms. Truth commissions have, in turn, created their own archives, which have strongly contributed to (...) later processes of reparation, justice and memory. The article aims to develop a better understanding of the multiple roles that archives have played as tools for achieving truth, justice and reparation over the long transitional period in Chile. The article argues that a combination of several factors and the intervention of different actors led to the archives having a significant impact in the development of subsequent transitional justice mechanisms. (shrink)